Won’t get spammed again?
This is probably me being anal, but I’m going to be pro-active about the spam comments business, on the principle that it can only get worse and an hour or two put in now may save me a lot of hassle later. So this weekend’s blog housekeeping will include installing some fixes that won’t affect your viewing and commenting pleasure (or make extra work for me; no way am I introducing comment moderation as standard). I’ve already done a couple of easy things in the admin interface. But the main things I have in mind this weekend:
1) there’s apparently a plugin I can install to close comments after a certain period of time (although I haven’t found a link to download it yet…)
2) a little trickery from the WP support forums to keep away autospammers (it involves renaming the comments file, and looks easy enough)
3) try out the comment spam blacklist that I’ve also seen references to
Not that I’ll be able to tell whether any of it works, really; but if anyone has had miraculous results with something that was simple to implement, I’d like to know.
Also: I swear that I recently found an section in the admin interface where you could set how much time has to elapse before a commenter can post a comment (to the same thread) again (the correct term, I now know, is ‘timeout’). But now I can’t find it. Did I imagine it?
And by the way, if you’re getting a lot of email spam from your website (or possibly even from email links in your comments on blogs), I already have something to fix it in use on EMR: the obfuscator. It works: I now get almost no spam to that address. Happy about that. 
Update I have done 1 (definitely works) and 3 (hopefully works). Comments will be closed after 30 days; I don’t think I’ve ever had a comment after that length of time! I’m not sure about doing 2, however. If I rename my comments.php file so that spammers won’t recognize it, well, I can’t easily recognise it either, can I? What if I forget what I renamed it to? (I have now done it anyway; it’s still recognisable to me, but should fool a bot.) And for WP’ers out there who are concerned about these things, this page contains all the solutions.
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Well, you could just rename it commentsonemn.php or something self-evident.
Not that I think that it will save you much.
From experience, I am noticing that people actually visit my site, read my entry and THEN leave a spam for cialis. usually with a note saying they enjoyed the blog. go figure.
Comment by sepoy — Sunday, 3 October 2004 @ 1:27 am
It’s probably keeping away the autospammers that I’m most bothered about - allegedly changing the filename to something else puts them off the scent in the first place. I don’t know why your comment was put into moderation, by the way… hang on, unless it’s the reference to c….s.
Comment by Sharon — Sunday, 3 October 2004 @ 9:30 pm
Yes, that was it. (!)
Wait a minute, where’s my gravatar gone?
Oh, it must be their server down or something. They’re missing at wolfangel’s and Harrison’s places at the moment too. I just hate it when something like that happens after you’ve been fiddling with things and you don’t know if something you did has had some horrible knock-on effect that you don’t know how to fix…
Comment by Sharon — Sunday, 3 October 2004 @ 9:35 pm